As an alternative to the approach taken here, readers may wish to
consult Li & Crane's (1996a, b)
"American Psychological Association Embellished Style." Li &
Crane also discuss "Modern Language Association (MLA) Embellished
Style." Those wishing to use citations tailored to the MLA school may
also wish to consult Walker (1995) and Wainwright
(1995).

The more generic guide provided by Quinion (1996)
offers still another approach, while Ivey (1996)
can be read as a review of the points each of these approaches speak
to. There is also a summary of ideas for citing electronic texts
(e-texts) by Tent (1995), and a short page
discussing URLs in biomedical texts by Beckleheimer (1994),
available for those who are interested. Also, a very extensive German
language text on the same question is available from Bleuel
(1995).

This is an evolving standard. This document should be considered
under construction. Comments and suggestions are encouraged,
and should be sent by electronic mail (e-mail) to the author via
beads@beadsland.com.

Elements of References in WEAPAS Style

Author Variations

World Wide Web documents described as "maintained" should refer to
the author with the parenthetical modifier, Maintainer
(abbr Maint.), although the more generic Ed.
(i.e. Editor) may also be used.

Two special cases of author identifiers are considered under the
Web Extension: e-mail addresses and nicknames/handles.

Electronic Mail Address as Author

If the element of a Web page lists an e-mail address, and no
other information is available to suggest the author of the page,
the e-mail address should fill the author position of the
reference.

Generic aliases (e.g. webmaster, maintainer) are an
exception. In these cases, treat the organization which the
documents represent (usu., but not always, the organization
running the server on which they are found) as a group or
corporate author. This organization will likely be found also in
the ADDRESS field in proximity to the eMail address.

All links which might name an author for a document
(e.g. an anchor on the e-mail address itself, a "Return to
Home" or "About the Author" link) should be exhausted before
resorting to using an e-mail address.

Newsgroup postings and other documents which are only
identifable by an e-mail addresses should also use the e-mail
address as author.

No capitalization or other changes in case should be made to
e-mail addresses in the author position.

When citing references with e-mail addresses for authors,
write out the full e-mail address as if it were a surname.

Nickname or Handle as Author

As with e-mail addresses, all potential links to pages in
which a real name might be found should be exhausted before using
a nickname as author.

If an author is commonly known by a handle, while their real
name is also known, the handle may be included in brackets
immediately following the real name in the author position. In
such cases, the abbreviation "a.k.a." (for 'Also
Known As') should be used to identify the nickname as such.

The first letter of a handle should be capitalized. Unless the
handle tends to be recognized by the use of non-standard case
schemes (e.g.eNiGmA, mrEd), which
should be preserved to aid in identification (i.e. the
first letter should maintain its original case).

If a nickname is given as author, because the real name can
not be determined, but an e-mail address for the individual is
also known, the e-mail address should be included in brackets
immediately following the nickname.

Date Variations

Because some types of online documents may be updated or modified
by their authors' at any time, references to these documents should
date the document version used with as much specificity as possible,
with the following guidelines:

References to articles in monthly serials, which will not be
modified once distributed, need only list the year and month of
publication. If the periodical is a recognized journal, with
volume and issue numbers, only the year should be listed.

Articles in newsgroups should be referenced not only by date,
but by time, to distinguish them from other articles in the same
thread by the same author. The format for such time references
should be of the form "(Year, MonthDate, GMTHour:Minute:Second)"
where GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time, and Hour is
on a 24 hour clock.

Online documents which provide no information as to the date
they were created or last modified, should be treated as
republished versions of works with no date of initial publication
(APA, 1994, p. 173), such that the reference
would be of the form. "(n.d./Year)" where
Year is the year the document was retrieved.

When referencing documents which are likely to change
unpredictably over time (e.g. many Web pages) the year may
be followed by the month and day (if available).

In earlier revisions of this update, it was recommended
that the word "version" should be appended to the dates of Web
pages. This has been deemed redundant however, and so has been
dropped from the current proposal.

Visiting Date

Optionally, one may choose to list the date a document was
downloaded or viewed online, should there be a concern that the
document might expire in the forseeable future. Such dates come at
the end of the reference, parenthesized in the form "(visited
Year, MonthDate)"

Title Variations

Generally the title of an online document should be immediately
recognizable. There are some variations to watch out for however.

The Subject: line of a newsgroup article should
be treated as its title. Although the prefix "Re:" or
its cognate, a series of one or more closing angle brackets
(">"), should be dropped. Messages lacking a
subject or marked explicitly as "No subject" or
similarly tagged, should be treated as untitled works.

Gopher menus (as opposed to discrete files retrieved by a
gopher server) do not have titles, only description(s) of content,
which may be provided by external pointers to the menu. It is
recommended that such a description be included in brackets in the
title position, otherwise the gopher menu should be treated as an
untitled work.

The title of a HTML Web document should be taken from the
<TITLE> element of that page. If the client
used to view this page does not automatically display the contents
of the <TITLE> element, it must be found by
looking at the source file. Should the title given in header
(e.g.<H1>) elements vary substantially
from the that in the <TITLE> element, it may be
listed also, following the <TITLE> part, and
separated by a semicolon.

Types of Documents

There are many different types of documents and services available
on the Internet. The nature of a given document should be given in
brackets immediately following the title.

Database

An online database other than WAIS.

Digitized image

Graphics file in .gif, .jpg, or some other format.

Digitized sound file

Recorded or sythesized audio file.

Digitized vide file

Film, movie, or animation as an electronic data file.

Electronic data file

Something for which these other descriptors is not entirely
appropriate.

FTP archive

Subdirectory within an FTP accessed file system.

Gopher menu

Location in gopher space other than a terminal document
node.

On-line news posting

Article in a Usenet or local newsgroup

On-line search query

A database query or similar service accessed by gopher, or via
the Web using the GET method.

On-line serial

Periodical distributed by eMail or in another form.

On-line service

Service other than a database, accessible via telnet or other
protocols.

PostScript file

File containing instructions for rendering a document on a
PostScript printer or other device.

Text file

File containing text which may be read without a special
program.

WAIS database

Publicly accessible WAIS.

WAIS query

Results of a search of a WAIS database.

WWW document

An HTML document which must be viewed using a World Wide Web
client.

Note that postings to mailing lists (e.g. Listserv, MajorDomo) are
not included here. As these documents are not publicly retrievable at
a later date, and are seen only by those individuals who are
subscribed to the list at the time the message was sent, they should
be treated as personal communications.

Publication Information

The Web Extension employs URLs in the publication element of
references, under the following conditions:

Each unique Uniform Resource Locator should be prefaced with
the keyword "URL" followed by a space.

A URL should not end with a period or other punctuation.

If a URL should run longer than the space available on a line,
it may be broken at a slash ("/") character, keeping
the slash as the last character on the line, in the same way as a
dash ("-") is used to divide hyphenated words.

When the retrieval of a document involves the sending of
e-mail, the mailto: URL should be followed by any
information required in the mail for retrieval. This information
shall be prefixed by either the keyword Message: (if
it is to be included in the body of the mail) or the keyword
Subject: (if it is meant to appear on the subject
header line). A space should delimiter both sides of the keyword,
but no other punctuation (other than the colon in the keyword)
should be used.

For documents which have alternative methods of online
retrieval, the URL for each retrieval method should be listed,
with URLs delimited by a single space and no other
punctuation.

Examples

Unfortunately, I have not yet had the free hours to sit down and
write up the extensive examples I had planned. Please be patient. In
the meantime, the format of the References, below,
should be a good jumping off point.